Introduction

A month or so ago, HTC decided that it was high time it put an end to the selfie race and unveiled the HTC Desire EYE, a smartphone that is doomed to intrigue with its ginormous 13MP selfie snapper. However, the front-facing camera is just one of the assets of the Desire EYE, because it also packs pretty respectable hardware under its predominantly-plastic hood. On paper, it seems that HTC's foray into selfie-centric phones might be a pretty successful one, but is this truly the case? Let's find out!

In the box:

handset

charger

USB charging cable

Design

A big, surprisingly pleasant to hold handset that has certain issues

Despite its large dimensions (5.97 x 2.91 x 0.33 inches or 151.7 x 73.8 x 8.5 mm) and weight of 5.43 oz (154g), the large HTC Desire EYE does is not unwieldy and feels good in the hand. On the contrary, the device is pleasantly ergonomic and sits good in the hand.This time around, HTC put its faith into hard, matte plastic as a build material, both for the back and for the sides, which is pretty pleasant to touch and provides a more-than-acceptable amount of grip. It does not smudge easily, but still tends to hold a bit of grease, especially if your hands are sweaty or dirty.

It's quite possible that the main culprits for the tall silhouette of the device are the two frontal speakers (neatly hidden in gaps between the display's frames and the top/bottom bezel of the phone) and the large selfie camera up front. These take their toll and make the Desire EYE as tall as a Galaxy Note 4, for example.

Meanwhile, the right edge of the device is home to a set of hardware buttons (power/lock, volume rocker, and a dedicated two-step camera shutter key), the interaction with which is quite unpleasant – they are shallow and it's extremely hard to discern them from the surrounding plastic. The two-step camera button is particularly unpleasant – it does not provide enough feedback about its position. At the left side of the phone, we can find the slots for the nano SIM and the microSD cards, which fit rather tightly inside the frame. The HTC Desire EYE is IPX7-certified, too, which means that it will live to tell the tale if you dip it in the water – in particular, for as long as 30 minutes at a depth of up to a meter.

Display

Excellent outdoor visibility and acceptable color reproduction

Up front, we have a 5.2" 1080p display that has a pretty good pixel density of 424ppi – the display is sharp enough and we failed to discern any individual pixels. It also is very bright, vibrant, and has an excellent outdoor visibility. At the same time, its contrast is top-notch, too, but the color accuracy leaves something to be desired – its readings don't exceed the borders of the sRGB color chart, but the display fails to match with many of the color targets. The Desire EYE reproduces colors a tad bluer than they should be in real life – it has a color temperature of 7248K, noticeably higher than the reference of 6500K. The gamma, at 2.37, is also above the perfect value of 2.2. The viewing angles are mediocre at best, yet acceptable.

The CIE 1931 xy color gamut chart represents the set (area) of colors that a display can reproduce, with the sRGB colorspace (the highlighted triangle) serving as reference. The chart also provides a visual representation of a display's color accuracy. The small squares across the boundaries of the triangle are the reference points for the various colors, while the small dots are the actual measurements. Ideally, each dot should be positioned on top of its respective square. The 'x: CIE31' and 'y: CIE31' values in the table below the chart indicate the position of each measurement on the chart. 'Y' shows the luminance (in nits) of each measured color, while 'Target Y' is the desired luminance level for that color. Finally, 'ΔE 2000' is the Delta E value of the measured color. Delta E values of below 2 are ideal.

The Color accuracy chart gives an idea of how close a display's measured colors are to their referential values. The first line holds the measured (actual) colors, while the second line holds the reference (target) colors. The closer the actual colors are to the target ones, the better.

The Grayscale accuracy chart shows whether a display has a correct white balance (balance between red, green and blue) across different levels of grey (from dark to bright). The closer the Actual colors are to the Target ones, the better.

There's actually an error here, the Antutu Benchmark score of the phone is wrong, I kept testing the phone a lot of times, it Always scores around 40 to 42,000+ sometimes beating the One M8 but just a hair behind Galaxy S5, it only gets a score of 28,000+ when I turned on the Battery Saver or Optimize Battery Life button. The Desire Eye deserves a better score here, the only question mark for me are the hardware buttons, the rest is hands down Perfect.

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